So let’s do the last remaining piece of the puzzle. If you are going to deliver your game to players, you will have to package it nicely for them to download and install. The packaging process is different for newer platforms such as iOS or the Android Google Play marketplaces, but for Windows and OS X, this means building an installer. This will package everything nicely together in a single file that the user can download and double-click, and which will leave the game in the conventional location for installed apps on their system.

Since we are doing Windows and OS X mainly, I will build installers for these. I use package managers for Linux, but I haven’t really looked into how those are built – if anyone can shed some light about this in the comments, together with how to tackle the multiple-incompatible-Linux-package-managers issue, I will be grateful!

So today I took the time to add some text-based menus. Nothing out of the ordinary, but something necessary for any complete game. I spiced up the menu just by having graphics from the game in the background – this is a common trick by all cost-conscious game developers since time immemorial!

First thing I needed some way to draw text. OpenGL doesn’t provide any built-in way to do so, so you need to do it your own way. The simplest thing is to prepare a texture with your font, and paint pieces of this texture for each character. You can see the texture right next to this text (this is a font by Marc Russell from SpicyPixel – thanks!), and here is the code to do the text drawing using this font: